How Peter Paid Gets It Done With A New York State of Mind
Written by Emma Riva
Published on June 9th, 2025
“I don’t half-ass anything,” artist and DJ Peter Paid told me. This includes when during a long set at a nightclub, he feels nature calling. He mixes a really long song, scurries over to the club bathroom, and hopes people take pity when he protests “I’m the DJ!” to line-goers, but respects the hustle of those who fire back “You still gotta wait in line!” If that’s the case, it’s back to the DJ booth to hold it in. He’s always carried the attitude of finishing what he started.
“If I’m going to do something, then I do it correctly. There have been many occasions where I’m sure I’ve been called lazy, but once I hit a certain age I was like ‘If I’m gonna spend the time doing it, why waste my own time?’” Paid said.
Born Peter Levine in Sheepshead Bay, Paid has grit and no-nonsense attitude of a native New Yorker. I was raised by one and grew up in uptown Manhattan, so I always recognize it. He displayed the borough and neighborhood territoriality that all locals have, too. Paid made the move from Brooklyn to Staten Island and described his previous attitude when his sister who lived there suggested he also move as “never” and “don’t even think about it.” (My dad, who grew up in Harlem and Morningside Heights, agonized over moving to a cheap apartment on York Avenue on the Upper East Side in his ‘20s because of the neighborhood’s yuppie connotation and perceived betrayal of the West Side).
“If I’m going to do something, then I do it correctly. There have been many occasions where I’m sure I’ve been called lazy, but once I hit a certain age I was like ‘If I’m gonna spend the time doing it, why waste my own time?’”
But Paid’s move to Staten Island wasn’t just an inter-borough gasp for more space. “In October 2024, I suffered a massive heart attack. I should not have survived. But I did,” he said. When his sister showed him a listing in Staten Island after his health crisis, he considered it. Now he has a garage, a laundry room, a driveway, and a backyard. “Don’t get me wrong, dealing with going over the bridge to go to Brooklyn isn’t ideal, but the trade-off is absolutely worth it.” More space gives him time to focus on his health, with grassy outdoors on either side of his new home, a cheaper rent, and a bigger studio space.
“Everything right now is dealing with my health. Without that, I’m no longer around. When I had the heart attack, it was my first time in my life I’d been in an ambulance or been in the hospital myself. I had 100% blockage in one artery, 80% blockage in another,” Paid told me. The heart attack occurred right after he was at Comic Con at Jacob Javits Center, promoting a toy subway car he’d painted with graffiti lettering. He drove home to Brooklyn while actively in cardiac arrest and passed out in front of his apartment in Bay Ridge. His cardiologist worked to keep him alive while his body was trying to die. “In my head, I’m still a kid. But now I’m older than my grandfather was when I was born. Things are a lot different than 40-50 years ago, and you don’t realize it until something like that happens,” Paid said.
When he was a teenager, Paid’s graffiti style of choice was bombing on trains. He grew up across the street from one of the biggest lay-ups in the city, where the express trains would sit and wait during off-hours, practically asking for tags. He was into breakdancing and found his way into graffiti from there. Once he started, he was going out ot the lay-up every night. “Growing up during the time that I did you had your people that veered a little bit more towards the hip hop, and then you had kids that were more into rock and heavy metal. The natural progression from breakdancing was graffiti and DJ-ing,” he remembered. He cycled through a couple of tags, and then wrote out the whole alphabet to see which letters he liked doing best. He landed on P-A-D-E. But there was another writer, from a crew called RTW, who already had that name. So, he went with P-A-I-D, and that was what stuck.
“Everything boils down to style, the funkier or the cooler you can make your tag look, so you can write it without much practice. Fortunately for me, I was able to keep the same pronunciation and PAID seemed to work,” he said. One of the things he values most about style writing is for a tag to look cool whether it’s in pen and pencil or with a spray can—a skill he feels is often lost from younger writers. Just as with DJ-ing, technology changes people’s relationship to the craft.
Paid grew out of bombing over time but kept DJ-ing at clubs as big as Limelight and The Red Zone. “Graffiti, especially doing it illegally, is the adrenaline rush of any second you could turn around and you’re caught. But I kind of thrive off seeing people dancing and really vibing off of the music that I’m playing,” he recalled. At the same time, he attended the prestigious High School of Art and Design and developed a more formal art career. A friend of his worked at a sign-painting business and offered Paid a job there too, painting lettering on signs. At first, it was rough going. “Every single day I’m thinking ‘this guy is just gonna fire me.’ I was always thinking ‘How long is he gonna go on paying me until he realizes that I’m no good at this?’” Paid said. Holding the brush required a lot more precision than bombing trains.
“It’s a ‘pinch myself’ moment when I get to create artwork for people that I grew up with listening, watching, and playing their music,”
But one day, his boss saw him throwing away wads of paper and getting frustrated. His boss unrolled a piece of paper, turned to Paid, and said ‘Look, it’s only paper.’ That was a watershed moment for Paid, when he realized that what he was doing was not a life-or-death task worth beating himself up over. “I was still terrible, but I didn’t stress about being terrible. I was able to really learn and embrace it. I was loving it when I was terrible at it, and I knew at one point I would get better.” That day did come, and now Paid has done signs for legends like Pharrell, Dr. Dre, and DJ Jazzy Jeff. “It’s a ‘pinch myself’ moment when I get to create artwork for people that I grew up with listening, watching, and playing their music,” he said. It fills him with pride to see his lettering in Jazzy Jeff’s studio for every live taping he does.
Though he still DJs, Paid only accepts gigs where he knows he can play what he wants. He prefers to play 6 hours at a time, mixing and blending songs together for a cohesive experience. “I want to take people on a musical journey. I run the gamut and weave it all together,” he said. He still makes signs and paints murals, working on projects with the likes of Cey Adams and Janette Beckman. After surviving the unthinkable, Peter Paid is just happy to live and finds joy in every moment. His art practice gives him time to just get into a flow state. “I zone out while I’m doing it, he said. “I love building lettering where the second you put that brush on the canvas, you’re seeing something appear right in front of your eyes coming from your hand. When I asked him if there was one sign he was most proud of making, he refused to single one out: “I’m proud of all of them, every one.” With a career like his, who wouldn’t be?
Emma Riva is a novelist and art journalist. She is the author of Night Shift in Tamaqua, an illustrated novel that follows a love story between 24-hour-diner waitress and a Postmates driver. As an art writer, she is particularly interested in working with international artists and exploring how visual art can both transcend cultural boundaries and highlight the complexities of individual identity. Emma is a graduate of The New School and a Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation Author of Tomorrow. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
